A scanner for the electronic acquisition and storage of alphanumerical characters is already known from document WO 92/11610. With such devices, the light of a radiation source is projected via a projection device onto a predeterminable detail of a surface marked with alphanumerical characters and the reflected light is reproduced via an optical unit on an image sensor converting the light into a sequence of electronic signals. A motion detector registers at the same time the motion of the scanner along a line of characters. A signal processing electronics integrated in the reading device converts the signals into a sequence of characters each corresponding with alphanumerical symbols. The characters can be stored as alphanumerical symbols in an integrated memory or transmitted via an interface to a computer for further processing.
Such scanners are limited to acquiring and storing alphanumerical characters line by line but are not capable of acquiring graphic representations or photographic pictures.